


Continuum

by JoJo



Category: Starsky & Hutch
Genre: Episode Related, Episode: s04e22 Sweet Revenge, Gen, Hurt/Comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-09-08
Updated: 2011-09-08
Packaged: 2017-10-23 13:12:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,024
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/250672
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JoJo/pseuds/JoJo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Coming home after Gunther, you'd think they'd be happy...</p>
            </blockquote>





	Continuum

On the designated day, at twelve-thirty, Eileen found two of three patients she was seeking in the Rec Room of Men's Surgical playing backgammon in near-silence.

"Ah c'mon," she said briskly when she appeared in the doorway, "you'll not be telling me this is a sad day?"

Jim, the burst appendix, and Benjamin, who'd just clocked up a month and a half since his car wreck, waved her away.

"It's not jealous you are, I hope?" Eileen inquired, a little haughty.

"Do you know nothing of the brotherhood of men?" Jim said.

"Enough to keep me awake at night, and would you be telling me where he is?"

"Packing," suggested Jim.

"Hiding," Benjamin added.

Eileen motioned up at the clock on the wall. "You're due for an x-ray at three, Jim, and they won't be wanting to track you down." She regarded them both, sitting there so morose and lackluster, when yesterday at this time they'd all three been in here laughing fit to bust open their stitches. "Don't you be letting him see you like this. You're to wave him away with a merry smile, or you'll have me to answer to."

The door of the Rec Room slapped shut; Jim and Benjamin exchanged glances.

Eileen retraced her steps up the corridor, passing Carlos wheeling his trolley. Carlos ducked his gaze.

"We took a walk," he mumbled at the floor.

Eileen threw up her hands. "Heaven knows we thought we lost him often enough ... I should be used to it. If you see his lordship again, let him know that his ride out of here is waiting. And he's got papers to sign."

The trolley squeaked away and Eileen, full of indignation but not altogether surprised, regained the nurses' station. The on-duty surgical nurses shook their heads at her. The long, tall frame of Hutch was leaning up against the side of the coffee machine opposite, arms crossed, a study in repressed impatience.

"He's gone walkabout," she told him.

Hutch pushed himself upright. He tapped his watch. "I told him twelve fifteen," he said, exasperated.

"Time doesn't mean the same thing in here, Hutch -- you know that."

"He can't have forgotten everything," Hutch grumbled, resentful as ever of the myriad clashing worlds he inhabited. "This is coming out of my lunchbreak."

Two of the med students from the last drug trial had come up from the other way and were hanging around.

"He's not here," Hutch said to them with a scowl.

Eileen wagged her head at him. "Sure and I'm going to miss your smiling face."

"Is this the farewell committee?" asked a new voice, and Dr Lovatt arrived.

"Prisoner's gone awol," Hutch told him. "The guy's going to drive me crazy, Doc ... he's desperate to be out of here, can't wait to see the back of this place."

"You'd think," Lovatt murmured.

"What's that supposed to mean?"

Hutch's tone was a tad too sharp, but Dr Lovatt had brushed off more than one emotional tongue-lashing from this quarter, and now he just blinked, owl-like, behind his spectacles. Detective Hutchinson was always bitter and fragile when he came in, but Lovatt knew he appreciated explanations.

"It's a fear-desire continuum," the doctor said, as if it were obvious.

"Of course it is," Hutch snapped out, dismissive.

"Yuh, we ... uh, see it with our long-term patients. Desperate to be out of here, as you say, but scared silly of being out there. It can cause a lot of conflict." He blinked again. "And, uh, Detective Hutchinson, tell me ... which particular part of this hospital do you hate the most?"

That was easy.

"Upstairs," Hutch said, illustrating the point with a jabbing finger.

"Quite. So go up there. That's where you'll find him."

Hutch looked to Eileen to ground himself. "Sure, 'tis a lot of blarney," she said, fixing Lovatt with a grim stare. "But since we can't locate himself anywhere else, you might as well go and see."

Hutch's temper was running high as he took the elevator up. He had so wanted today to go smoothly, since it was the day he had begged every God in the known universe to bring him. As far as he was concerned, this was going to be the day he hauled his sorry, whipped-dog life up by the scruff of its neck and set it back firmly on its feet. He had long imagined their jaunty, shoulder-to-shoulder walks as they swished out of the entrance doors of Memorial into the welcoming sunshine, the smiles they would have, the plans they would make. Being irritated with his partner for making him late was really just a cover for this elation, which he assumed Starsky shared, but now he was really and truly irritated with Lovatt for apparently knowing Starsky better than he did.

The doors opened on to the hushed corridor of Intensive Care.

The hush got Hutch right in the heart. He hadn't heard that hush for about three weeks, and as usual it shouted silently that this was the place where everything ended.

He felt he had ingested the very essence of this stretch of hospital even though at the time everything had appeared before unseeing eyes. He knew the dullness of the walls with their brown stripe, and the echo of the white tiles underfoot, how long it took before the water-cooler needed re-filling, every inflection of the emergency beepers. He even knew the feel of the seats in every cubicle in the men's room. One whiff of the well-known, clinical smell and Hutch felt like another crisis was approaching at full speed. Staggering with exhaustion along this corridor, blind to the impulses of hunger and thirst, he had lost all hope in here, and not just the one time.

There were familiar people at work as he rounded the corner, and he set his head down and paced along, taking care not to glance sideways. At the end, standing outside the glass and looking in to one of the rooms, was a figure that both belonged here and did not. Starsky was standing outside the very place where they had brought him after the first surgery, when his chances were poor but not yet as hopeless as they would become. The place where he had tried to make good his escape only to be catapulted back into the struggle by Hutch re-entering the atmosphere way too fast through the double doors. Coming calmly through those doors now and seeing him standing up and dressed caused pops of disbelief to fire off in Hutch's brain.

"Well if it isn't himself," he said as he got next to him and stood the current regulation inch apart. Looking through the glass he was relieved to find the room empty, the bed stripped down to its chrome, the machinery silent, the chair unoccupied. He looked at Starsky's reflection while Starsky stared deeply inside as if searching for something he'd left behind.

"I never saw it from this angle," Starsky said. "From your angle." He glanced sideways. "Thought I'd just look."

"Can we go?" Hutch said. "I mean, I mean ... can we just go now?"

"I feel like I should know this place."

"Well it isn't so great," Hutch said, "and believe me, I don't need to commit it to memory anymore. So would you come on already?"

Starsky grinned faintly. "Alright, I'm coming. Just need to make one more stop."

"What, the OR?" Hutch snarled. He didn't even know he had such a deep well of sarcasm in him. It tasted bad and he wished it would go away.

"Hey, I died in here, you know. It has significance."

"OK, fine. You died. But now you're going to live ... with me. Until I kill you."

"Anyone ever tell you how crabby you've gotten?" Starsky asked as they waited for the elevator.

"Lovatt says you don't want to leave," Hutch told him when they were inside. "Says you're scared."

"Lovatt says that?"

"Yup. He right?"

As they walked out of the elevator and began along to Men's Surgical, Hutch was suddenly aware that he had fallen into Starsky's step rhythm without thinking. They were moving slowly, Starsky protecting himself from the impact of every footfall and vibration, his defensive mechanism switching itself to automatic. He had been wandering around now for about half an hour and his shoulders sagged with tiredness. When he went into the Rec Room to find Jim and Benjamin, Hutch watched the delicate way they did farewell. There was no bear-hugging, no overt contact at all. But he felt the simple connection between the three and stood there in the doorway like a spare part, a miserable outsider who could only bring impatience and complication to the party.

Eileen caught sight of them meandering back to the nurses' station. The farewell committee had dispersed by this time, back to business, but she was wise to the fact that this was what the patient had wanted all along. Dr Lovatt might chatter about the psychology of discharge and that continuum thing he so liked, but Eileen just knew the evidence of her own long experience. She kissed him on the forehead to say goodbye, swift and unsentimental.

"Over to you," she said to Hutch, "and I wish you luck."

They were slow rather than jaunty coming out of the front doors, and outside in the smoggy sunshine everybody moved alarmingly fast, buffeting them with their energy.

"You wait here," Hutch commanded on the concourse. "I'll go get the car."

He felt suddenly terrified at leaving Starsky out here in the world, even for five minutes. Terrified that something mundane would happen that would have disastrous, unforeseen consequences. He realised that he was swerving backwards and forwards on Dr Lovatt's continuum as well and that he and Starsky would probably collide with one another somewhere along it, sooner or later. When he got back with the car, Starsky was still standing in the same spot. It was very odd, Hutch thought, because he seemed somehow indistinct, occupying the space almost apologetically, like someone with a foot in another world. Hutch did not yet know that any attempt to vocalize this would trigger an immediate collision.

When the door was swung open for him Starsky eased himself into the passenger seat and plopped his bag of meds down between them. Pain was already dragging at the corner of his eyes.

Hutch felt a sudden impulse to take him back inside, insist that neither of them were ready, and run away to the protection of the squadroom. Out of nowhere the precinct represented refuge. He sensed being looked at.

"I'm ready," Starsky said bullishly.

Behind them, a car honked, demanding their spot. Instinct overrode Starsky's defensive mechanism and he twisted in his seat as if he were going to yell. Halfway round he froze and then said, "no," through his teeth. He untwisted by degrees while Hutch stared at the clenched fist balled on his knee.

"This isn't going to be easy, is it, Starsk?" he said, wondering if he should reach over. Everything to do with touch had got so confused lately, so he kept his own hand where it was, although an imaginary one couldn't help but drift down to wrap around the white knuckles.

"Ah, easy ... who needs easy?" Starsky replied in a faint voice.

Behind them the car honked again. It seemed so long since they had sat upright side by side in any semblance of equality at all. Hutch finally forced himself to lift his imaginary hand off Starsky's fist and pulled out of the parking spot.

He drove into a stream of traffic, his shoulders stiff, wondering where his elation had gone.

"You're gonna just drop me off, right?" Starsky said. "And then go back to work?"

"Why? You need me not to go back?"

"Just making sure."

"Sure of what?"

"Making sure you haven't set up some surprise welcome home party or something."

Hutch winced. He had been that close to doing it. "Scary, huh?"

"Listen, I like the idea of a party," Starsky informed him, "but no way I'm going to it."

To Hutch that seemed unfair. He was pretty sure you weren't allowed to be on both ends of this continuum thing at once. He knew where he was, could feel the fear settling in his heart and gut as he followed Starsky's labored progress up the steps to the apartment. The tread was slow and light, and inside the door he stood insubstantial as a shadow, looking around while Hutch launched into an explanation of what had changed and how it was all going to work.

"Where's the party?" Starsky asked, a wry lilt in his voice. He had kept hold of the bag of meds and seemed not to be able to decide whether to let them go.

"It's a surprise, dummy," Hutch answered, galvanizing himself. He fetched some water and put it on the table. "So you don't unpack, right? You take your three o'clocks, you go to sleep."

"All alone, in this big house?"

"What, you're not happy to be home?"

Starsky advanced to the table and set down the bag. He was happy to be home in so far as wanting to find out what else wasn't easy, but he knew he couldn't do that while Hutch was on patrol.

"You're not the nurse," he said. "You're the breadwinner. So go win some bread."

"You'll be fine," Hutch said.

"I'm not worried."

Internally, Hutch slumped. It hurt, this not connecting, but he could find nothing more to say for the moment, leaving them in an odd limbo that he was afraid they might get used to. Since one of his lives dictated that he really needed to go, he made a fumbling exit from the apartment as Starsky was beginning to poke curiously around in the icebox. When he got back, four hours or more later, he found that Starsky had exhausted himself and was lying asleep on the bed with an uneaten sandwich next to him and an unopened can of soda clutched in the hand resting on his chest. Hutch grappled with the image. He was used to seeing him unconscious in the lonely, metallic surroundings of the hospital, swept away by the peculiar and cruel sleep that had stalked him since the shooting. A sleep that didn't look like sleep. It was quite another thing to see him like this in his own bed.

Hutch removed the can from Starsky's grasp. It was a salutory lesson in how deeply down the meds would send him because the tugging motion did not provoke the tiniest reaction. Instead, Hutch just watched an arm sliding away.

When Starsky did finally wake up it was to find Hutch sitting on the end of the bed with his head in his hands, which was not an unfamiliar sight.

Letting a few moments pass while he decided exactly what it felt like to be at home, and wondered how he hadn't managed to get to the sandwich, Starsky crooked the arm which he found dangling down towards the floor.

"Party started?" he asked.

"Hey," Hutch replied, jerking to attention. He was half disbelieving, as usual, that Starsky had woken up at all, but he knew that from now on he had to try and stop showing it.

Starsky grimaced as he got ready to make the transition from lying to sitting. Hutch let him sit up. He let him stand up and make for the kitchen, tip the curled-up sandwich into the trash, straighten and turn. The simple motion caused instant stress through every mark they'd made on him, taking his breath away. Coming up alongside Hutch lightly touched on the back of Starsky's shoulder, a one-second touch against a scapula that really shouldn't be sticking through the shirt in quite such a skeletal way.

"Suppose you sit down," he said, forcing himself not to make anything more of it.

"I don't want to," Starsky said, in a narrow-eyed tone which told Hutch that right now even the one-second touch was unwelcome. He had moved away from the range of Hutch's arm and stood stranded.

"I'm going to yell at you soon," he said.

"You are?"

"Uh-huh."

"Why, what will I do?"

"Oh you know, you'll be all over me tryin to get me up, or down, or to stop this, or do that. Or you'll be lookin at me like I'm a ghost or somethin, and then ... then, Hutchinson, I'm gonna yell at you. And you might yell back ... I don't know, we'll have to see." Starsky's voice was shaking slightly.

Hutch nodded slowly, realizing that Starsky was just as wary of the upcoming collision. He sought a truce, to give them enough time to draw up a battle plan. "But not today?"

"Today I think I'll go easy on you."

"Well good." Hutch got himself to the couch and whipped the cushions into shape. "See, you don't have to wait for the trolley tonight, Starsk, and you get to choose what's on the menu ... well, once in a while you do. If you want to play backgammon, or chess, or watch crap, that's fine. Lights out whenever you want. And I won't be coming to stick a thermometer up your ass every fifteen minutes."

While there were some way-stations on the continuum that he didn't like the look of at all, dangerous way-stations where he knew an imaginary touch would be the only one permitted, Hutch figured they might avoid them until the morning at least. He stood up straight again and came round behind Starsky where he still hovered, undecided and precarious.

His hand sank into the rumpled back of Starsky's shirt and he kept it there, letting the seconds tick by while his partner tried to shrink his spine away somehow. "I will yell back, you know," he said quietly. "Tomorrow."

"No kidding," Starsky huffed, but he'd let go the muscles. "Why'd you think I'm so pleased to be home?" and he leant into the hand to let it cradle him to safety.


End file.
